Many medical devices used in intensive care units of hospitals provide acoustic (audible) alarms, if specific conditions or events occur. The medical device or devices are typically arranged near to a patient's bed and are for monitoring one or more physiological characteristics of a patient, such as heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, blood oxygen levels, etc, and/or for providing some treatment to a patient, such as controlling the administration of an intravenous drug, assisting the patient's breathing, etc. The specific conditions that lead to alarms being triggered can refer to, for example, abnormal values of the physiological characteristics of the patient or specific operating states or error states of the device.
The alarms issued by these devices are primarily for the attention of the healthcare staff in the hospital and serve to acoustically alert staff members to direct their attention to the device and take any appropriate or required action. Although the alarm sound level for a particular medical device may be able to be set by the end users (the healthcare staff) to specific levels, these levels will typically stay fixed after being set during installation, which means that alarm sounds are played with a fixed absolute sound power level. This level will have been set sufficiently high to guarantee that healthcare staff will be alerted despite the environment in which the medical device is being used being very noisy (for example if many staff members are speaking simultaneously and/or if there are lots of noisy medical devices being used). In some cases, the level can be set sufficiently high so that the alarm can be clearly heard outside the room in which the patient is located, which means that the alarm will be particularly loud for a patient that is lying next to the medical device.
It has been found that alarm sounds issuing from medical devices associated with a particular patient have a strong negative impact on the recovery of that patient and any nearby patients since the alarms lead to increased anxiety in the patient and sleep interruptions. This problem is particularly evident for patients in an intensive care unit where there may be many different medical devices associated with each patient, each having their own alarm sounds and volumes.
Therefore, there is a need for systems and methods for reducing the negative impact that these alarm sounds have on patients while ensuring that healthcare staff are still adequately alerted.